The Ripper's Children: Inside the World of Modern Serial Killers

By Raymond Cornell and Ilene W. Devlin

Imagine how you would feel if you woke up one day and learned that your best friend was the most prolific serial killer in America and most of his victims looked like you. That was the start of a forty-year quest to understand the mind of a killer and friend. The search led to others like him and their dark compulsions. How can they murder multiple human beings without remorse?

The Ripper’s Children: Inside the World of Modern Serial Killers examines how their murderous drives may originate. Can serial murderers control their killing sprees? Are the causes social, genetic, or biochemical? The book sheds light on the blackest corner of the human mind. This book may cause you to take a closer look at your relatives, friends, and neighbors.

Co-authors Raymond Cornell & Ilene Devlin

• Language: English
• Publisher: Raymond Cornell
• Release date: Sep 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781735734064

Raymond Cornell

I have lived an unusual life. Born into extreme poverty, I have been a cat burglar, convict, college graduate, and Iowa’s first prison ombudsman. I was also a pardoned ex-offender and a trained hostage negotiator. My background included working as a private investigator on dozens of murder cases and other major felonies. Besides testifying as an expert on federal prison cases, I have consulted on numerous other murder cases around the country. Also, I am the brother of a murder victim and of a convicted killer. Recently, I consulted on and appeared in two television specials, “John Wayne Gacy: Devil in Disguise” for NBC and another John Wayne Gacy show due to appear on Netflix in April 2022. Now writing in retirement, I am working on a history of prisons in America and an autobiography. I spend my spare time studying the cases of Sherlock Holmes and raising corgis and coleus with my wife Sandra.

Book preview

The Ripper’s Children

Inside the World

of Modern Serial Killers

The Ripper’s Children

Inside the World

of Modern Serial Killers

by Raymond Cornell and Ilene W. Devlin

The Ripper’s Children: Inside the World of Modern Serial Killers

© 2021 Raymond Cornell and Ilene W. Devlin

ORDERING INFORMATION: Additional copies may be obtained from Raymond Cornell at [e-mail] or 641-781-0436 and Ilene W. Devlin at [e-mail] or 210-854-6593.

ISBN – 978-1-7357340-6-4

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior approval of the authors. Printed in the United States of America.

Cover photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash.

DEDICATION

To Jan Johnson and Leo Oxberger who judged me and found me worthy and to the late Iowa Governor Robert D. Ray, one of the last good guys.

Raymond Cornell

Table of Contents

Dedication

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

The Human Predator

Juan Corona: Unanswered Questions

John Wayne Gacy: Killer Clown

Ted Bundy: Evil Wears a Smile

Two for One: The Hillside Stranglers

Wayne Williams: The Atlanta Child Killer?

Portrait of a Serial Murderer

Born to Kill?

The Whole Bloody Mess

Afterword: A Season in Hell

About the Authors

Bibliography

PREFACE

Why would anyone read a book like this, let alone write one? I wrote this book because I had to do so. Only you know why you are reading it.

This is not a murder novel, nor is it a psychology text. It is an attempt to define a phenomenon of modern life in terms understandable to those most likely to be touched by it: average, everyday people who are suddenly caught up in horror. There is no fiction here, only overwhelming, bloody death.

We can never really know what is going on in the mind of a John Gacy or a Ted Bundy. The best we can hope to achieve is to look at the things they do and to try to gain some insight into what makes them what they are.

Violent death has become an intrinsic part of life in America. We ingest massive doses of it from morning until night: newspapers, books, movies, and, most of all, television. From cradle to grave, we are taught that killing is an acceptable way to solve problems and to fulfill our needs. Yet we are surprised when some among us carry those fantasies into reality.

Having come from a family of criminals of one kind or another, I have always been aware of the attitudes and behavior making up that lifestyle. My years as a prisoner and more than a decade as a specialist in criminal justice have brought me into contact with hundreds of killers of one kind or another.

This book is the culmination of a decade of murders that touched me personally. In 1976, my brother was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for murder. In 1978, my friend, John Gacy, was charged with thirty-three murders. Finally, in 1980, a few weeks after John was sentenced to death for his crimes, my sixteen-year-old sister was brutally raped and killed by a person suspected of being a serial murderer.

In the years since, I have devoted myself to an effort to understand serial murder and its place in contemporary society. This book is the result of that effort.

Raymond Cornell

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To thank all the people who helped and encouraged us with this book would take many pages. People from every walk of life have played a part; the only thing they hold in common is that all of them have been touched by crime. Straights and gays, criminals and victims, prostitutes and cops, lawyers and judges, convicts and parole board members have all assisted to make this project work. Their names are not listed, but they know who they are. They also know the depth of our gratitude.

We would like to especially thank Dean Janet Johnson of the Pace University Law School who believed it could be done.

To our editor, Lillie Ammann, many thanks for your guidance.

INTRODUCTION

In the late summer and early fall of 1888, the city of London was gripped by a terror like none the world had ever seen. A silent, deadly force moved through the streets of the East End, killing with impunity and disappearing like smoke.

History knows him as Jack the Ripper. He was the father of the most horrible phenomenon in modern crime—serial murder. Many great killers struck before him, but they murdered primarily for reasons of politics, conquest, financial gain, and religion. With the appearance of Jack, for the first time, the reasons for killing became locked into the changing nature of society itself.

After he had concluded his gruesome, solitary business, Jack disappeared as suddenly as he had come. Even today, nearly a century later, speculation still exists as to his identity. Literary detectives, called Ripperologists, carefully sift and resift the evidence looking for the final clue.

Although his victims numbered no more than seven, and probably only five, an insignificant number by modern standards, the full impact of this new kind of criminal is only now showing its bloody blossom.

Yet, with the little we know, we can conclude much. In many ways, Jack set the stage for all those who came after him. The care and precision of the crimes, the taunting of police, and the virtual impossibility of apprehension by normal police procedures are all part of a pattern to be seen again and again.

Jack and his children have a great deal in common. Identifying and defining a few of these similarities may make this type of criminal a little more understandable. In this book, we will create a general profile of modern serial murderers and highlight areas for future study into what creates these killers.

The Human Predator

Murder is as old as mankind. Cain rose up and slew his brother Abel and invented murder. That set the pattern for most murders from then until now: uncontrollable anger erupts into a killing rage directed at a family member. A leavening of drugs or alcohol may be added to lower inhibitions and make the deed easier. Nothing much has changed.

Anthropologist Robert Ardrey suggested in his book The Territorial Imperative that man is descended not from some harmless omnivore ape but from a highly specialized killer ape whose aggressive drive lives on. While impossible to prove scientifically, this theory still holds considerable attraction for those who deal with the criminal aspects of human beings.

Many established members of the anthropological disciplines have taken strong issue with Ardrey. In one area, however, his viewpoint seems quite valid: crime.

If Ardrey had been a criminologist rather than an anthropologist, he would probably be a legend instead of being accused of being a crackpot.

Certainly, his approach is as applicable as any of the theories of thinkers such as Freud, Maslow, or Yochelson and Samenow. Freud thought criminality was a function of sexual aggression. While possibly true, that was a simplistic perspective. Maslow in his hierarchy of need attributed criminality to the search for identity. Yochelson and Samenow took the approach that criminal behavior was a matter of personal choice. Yet none of them seemed to succeed in comprehending the role of criminals in society or how changes in society lead to changes in types of criminal behavior.

As soon as early humans banded together and began to make rules for living as a group, they routinely began breaking those rules. It is important to keep in mind that people who violate the laws established either by a majority or by those in power are, by definition, criminals. Laws are written to reflect the attitudes and views of those who make them and often have only a limited relationship with what goes on in the real world. Laws are not made by the poor or disenfranchised, rather, by the affluent, the educated, and the articulate. The much-misused term silent majority defines the vast group of people who have no role in the making of the laws by which they must live. This explains to some degree why it is easy for those who feel they have no stake in a society to violate the rules of that society.

As civilization became industrialized, the individual became anonymous and lost his/her place in the world. Social philosophers call this alienation of the individual by technology anomie. One result can be an attempt to create identity through violence. As society has changed and moved away from the stable family unit and the resulting internalized behavioral controls, those restrictions have not been replaced with anything of equal strength. This has left a void in the values and motivations of many human beings.

Given that context, the taking of life as a problem-solving device has become more convenient. When faced with frustration, one simply bypasses all the lesser options, such as talking, negotiating, and bargaining, and goes immediately to the ultimate solution—murder. For thousands of years, indeed, to some extent still today, murder was the accepted and approved method for solving the problems of society and the individual.

The idea that murder is wrong is a rather recent development. Prior to the early writings, such as the Code of Hammurabi, c. 1750 BCE, few social restrictions on murderous conduct had been formulated. At that time, when one took the life of another human being, a blood debt was incurred. That debt was satisfied either in the form of some payment to the family/clan of the victim or that clan would take a life in return. The practice lives on in the form of the feud. However, rulers eventually saw that the approach was impractical. Hence, the beginning of laws controlling such behavior was developed. Murder became an offense against the ruler and all the people.

Take a moment and reflect on the other party involved in the transaction of murder: the victim. When Thomas Beckett was slaughtered in Canterbury Cathedral by the knights of Henry II, it was necessary for them to come close enough to feel his last breath on their faces. Murder was a personal, if not an intimate, act between two people. In modern times, actual physical contact is no longer necessary for murder. Guns and other weapons that kill at a distance have sanitized the act. It is no longer necessary to touch or even look into the eyes of one’s victim.

In addition, what by rights should be the most private act of a person’s existence, his or her death, becomes the center of a public spectacle. In modern times, not only are the actual circumstances of the death shown and discussed by the various media, but every aspect of the victim’s life becomes available for public debate. By virtue of being a victim, the person has his/her passage from life debased to the level of a circus sideshow. Thus, the murderer is the ultimate invader of personal privacy.

Western man has elevated this celebration of violence to the level of art. Walk through a museum and look at the great paintings. You will be amazed at how many portray scenes of violence and death. From the great masters and the deaths of saints to Picasso's Guernica, art reflects our attitudes. Murder, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. If a Fascist were to look at Guernica, he would merely see soldiers doing their job, which is killing. The people lying on the ground saw themselves as being murdered.

It is also extremely important to be aware of the semantics of death. The word used to describe the act or circumstance sets up a psychological frame of mind that justifies the deed. Killing is to cause the death of another. Killing becomes murder by the breaking of society’s rules and the addition of malice or premeditation. Killing in self-defense or in the defense of others is homicide, but, according to the law, lacks malice and is, therefore, not murder.

With the possible exception of sex, as many words for killing exist as for any human activity. The words roll glibly off the tongue, leaving one sadly ignorant of the reality of the act: murder, homicide, manslaughter, genocide, fratricide, matricide, suicide, kill, waste, blow away, and—that all-time favorite—terminate with extreme prejudice. Each of these in its own way is defining the same act. The variations on this theme are caused by the adding or subtracting of components: premeditation, malice, and so forth. In each case, we are, in fact, talking about the taking of a human life by another. Thus, murder by society’s definition involves the denial of another being’s right to exist.

During war, the term killing is used to release the military from the personal responsibility and social strictures against taking another human being’s life. The group being fought is wrong and should not exist. However, noncombatants are not considered part of that wrong group and usually are off limits for killing. The term killing lowers the status of the person whose life is taken to that of a nonentity and involves no lingering guilt for the taker.

How many times have you heard one little boy say to another, I'll kill you? Even in early childhood, people are subjected to society’s process of making the act of taking a life acceptable and appropriate. Several studies have estimated that by the time the average American child finishes elementary school, he has seen 8,000 murders on television. By the age of eighteen years old, he has witnessed 200,000 violent acts on television. Literally from every direction, we give our young the idea that murder, like baseball, is acceptable social behavior. The dichotomy between what we preach from the pulpit and what we view and enjoy in the living room is incredible.

One of the most amazing of all man’s attributes is his ability to justify anything he chooses to do in terms of a greater good. The rationales and rhetoric can be as varied as religion, nationalism, and the good of the group. This ability goes all the way down to the serial killer who murdered and mutilated ten people, because he was convinced it would prevent the San Andreas fault from collapsing and dropping California into the sea. He saw himself as taking a few lives in order to save millions. Another example would be serial murderers who have taken the lives of large numbers of prostitutes. They may very well be thinking to themselves that they kill not because they enjoy killing, but because prostitution is wrong.

As the twentieth century closed, senseless murder became a matter of national concern. More than two-thirds of all murders are committed by family members and acquaintances. The perpetrator usually surrenders or is apprehended within twenty-four hours. Often this is an average citizen who loses control of his or her behavior and murders someone. Criminal behavior but not necessarily a criminal personality.

The other nearly one-third are murders committed by strangers. These are much more difficult to solve and to prosecute successfully. They are often the result of a felony that may not be related to the actual homicide, such as robbery or rape. Mass murder usually falls into this category.

The phenomenon of group murder threatens to become commonplace. Two types of group murder exist: mass murder and serial murder. Mass murder is usually considered the act of one individual killing four or more people at one time. Serial murder is the act of one individual killing several people with a waiting period between the murders. The variations within these definitions are almost endless. For example, in the San Francisco Zebra killings, several individuals banded together to commit a long string of murders. Some individuals killed several people on one occasion and several more on another occasion. Technically, this would make them serial mass murderers. However, the basic definitions remain valid.

A tiny category is the province of the serial murderers. The FBI defines serial murder as the unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s) at separate times. Other authorities define a serial murderer as someone who kills a minimum of five people over time.

The FBI in its Uniform Crime Report speculates at least thirty-five serial murderers are active at any given time. The Murder Accountability Project, a nonprofit that compiles homicide data, calculated some 2,000 serial killers were at large in the United States in 2017. Using the FBI definition and numbers, serial murderers kill at least seventy-five people a year. Using the nonprofit’s numbers of 2,000 killers and a minimum of five victims each, that equates to over 10,000 victims a year. Although these, like any other law enforcement statistics, must be viewed with a grain of salt, we, the authors, are inclined to agree with the higher numbers. This is based on analyses of crime trends, homicide trends, and research into the behaviors of serial killers. These statistics are even more dramatic when one considers that these crimes are the handiwork of a small number of individuals.

Some would say that mass and serial murders reflect compulsive consumerism. It is not enough to kill your enemies; it has now become necessary to kill anyone who reminds you of your enemies. When a man walks into a post office in Oklahoma and kills fourteen other postal workers basically because they are wearing the same uniform, he is not really killing the boss who intended to fire him; he is killing the system. It’s nothing personal to him.

In the minds of many, the serial murderer is definable as a sort of human rogue. A rogue is an individual who, for whatever reason, is ostracized by or separates himself from the body of the herd or group. A human rogue is not content merely to be separate. As a result of his isolation, he may turn on the group and kill. The motive for this violence is vengeance.

These marauders have always been with us in one form or another. Historians conjecture that individuals of this type may be at the root of many of the myths and scary tales of our childhood. It is not a difficult leap to go from the behavior of a Dracula to a Ted Bundy: striking from the dark, mutilating the victim, and disappearing.

In our struggle toward civilization, we have brought this creature from the dark along with us. The serial murderer as we now know him has become a sort of technological boogey man. In society but not of society, he moves through the darker places of our culture, doing what his predecessors did: killing and frightening. We are far too sophisticated to take the poor old vampire count seriously, but a Ted Bundy frightens us as much as Dracula would have frightened a seventeenth-century peasant and for the same reasons.

In examining the serial murder phenomenon, we went back to late 1888 and the father of them all—Jack the Ripper. By modern standards, Jack, with his five victims, would be penny-ante stuff. However, Jack laid the groundwork for most of what has followed. Many people consider him to be the first true, recorded sex criminal. Before the end of the nineteenth century, the concept of the sex crime did not exist. People who committed offenses like that were usually considered to be morally insane. The concept of sex as a primary motivator for criminal behavior was incomprehensible. Thanks to Jack the Ripper, all that was about to change.

Between 31 August and 8 November 1888, five of the most gruesome murders ever encountered to that time were committed in the East End of London. The first four victims, prostitutes and women of the lower class, were killed in the byways of the poverty-stricken Whitechapel district. The women’s throats were slashed and their genitals mutilated. The fifth victim, another prostitute, was a woman named Mary Kelly. Photographs of the death scene reveal mutilation almost beyond belief. All five were disemboweled with a skill that made police certain they were dealing with either a butcher or a doctor who had gone insane.

The killer has, at different times, been called Leather Apron, Bloody Knife, Red Jack, and Jack the Ripper. The killer and these crimes have been the subject of literally thousands of books, short stories, treatises, and articles. With all that, we still know next to nothing about the person who committed them.

Jack has been credited with several speculative motives. He has been accused of being a social reformer speaking out against the appalling conditions of the poor of Victorian England. Perhaps he was a Russian anarchist attempting to create political unrest among those same poor. One of the most popular theories has been that Jack was an insane member of the Royal family. Whatever the truth is, the atmosphere of terror created in that three-month span dramatically affected life in Great Britain and set the pattern for serial murderers who followed.

Jack was the first serial murderer also to be his own public relations man. He took great amusement in sending snide and insulting letters to the police and the newspapers, creating a tradition that continues today. On one occasion, he sent a police official part of a kidney from one of his victims. The accompanying letter said in part, I ate the rest and it was delicious.

He also has another distinction that, for better or worse, continues: striking from out of the dark then disappearing forever. The terror he created remained as his legacy. No one felt safe, and many suspected friends and acquaintances of being the faceless monster. After the murder of Mary Kelly on 8 November 1888, Jack disappeared. He was never apprehended.

As Jack faded from center stage, his successors seemed to concentrate on the western side of the Atlantic. The following decades would see occasional instances of serial murderers. Men appeared like Carl Panzram, whose basic philosophy of life was that most human beings were too ignorant to be allowed to live. He killed twenty-one people and sodomized over one thousand males. Executed in 1930, he laughed on the gallows. Earle Nelson, who traveled around the United States and Canada, raped and murdered twenty-two women. His crimes were so brutal the press dubbed him The Gorilla Killer. Crimes of that type occurred but infrequently. Most of the killers were never apprehended, and those who were have long since been obscured by time.

Serial murder is largely an American phenomenon. In the span between 1900 and 2010, 4,479 serial murderers were identified worldwide. America, with a little over four percent of the world’s population, produced 3,092 (sixty-nine percent) of those—over twice as many as the rest of the countries on earth combined.

A number of factors have converged in America to create this climate for murder. First, they include the absolute freedom of movement enjoyed by Americans. No checkpoints in the United States block passage from state to state. The vast distances making up the American landscape allow a murderer to kill victims hundreds, if not thousands, of miles apart within a day or so. Second, the obsessive respect for privacy upon which we insist, combined with our rights under the First Amendment, handicap police efforts to collect intelligence data that could lead to apprehension in crimes of this type. Lastly, the over 17,985 autonomous law enforcement agencies in this country are simply too numerous and communicate too poorly to work well together. Given these and other factors, it is conceivable that a fully developed serial murderer could take literally hundreds of lives and stop only when incarcerated or dead.

The very things that go into making up the so-called American character—our willingness to trust others, our reliance on authority figures, our fondness for helping those we consider disadvantaged, and our almost limitless gullibility—are also the things that make it possible for these killers to identify and take their victims with ease. Tragically, most victims thoughtlessly place themselves in jeopardy. They pay for their trust with their lives.

Beginning with Albert DeSalvo (the Boston Strangler) and continuing through the current search for the Long Island Serial Killer, serial murderers have become a part of our everyday lives. Probably every American can name four or five serial murderers. Their names roll off the tongue as readily as movie stars: Juan Corona, Wayne Williams, the Hillside Strangler, Gacy, Bundy, Son of Sam, and the Green River Killer. These are some who have been apprehended.

Although we, the authors, have serious reservations about the guilt of some of the individuals mentioned, they all have been convicted of several homicides and are believed to be guilty of many more. Each of these individuals has been linked to at least five victims. For our research into serial murderers, we primarily have used the period between 1971 and 1981, because a vast amount of material is available on these criminals, and Kenneth Bianchi and Wayne Williams are still living as of 2021.

For over two decades, those murderers littered the streets and countryside of America with bodies. Why? Who are they? From where do they come? How can they be stopped? These questions have answers; some of them are unpleasant. In researching this work, we, the authors, were confronted not only with the statistics of unsolved homicides but with an indictment of law enforcement agencies and their techniques. Serious questions were raised about the effectiveness of the judicial system and its stepchild, the corrections system. We also found that public apathy toward violent crime has facilitated the creation of an environment where killers like these not only exist but thrive.

Murderers, like their victims, do not exist in a vacuum. To understand them, we must understand their world. To understand the shark, you must learn something about the ocean. Because we do not know who the uncaught ones are, we can only use what we know about those who have been apprehended to speculate about the others. In the succeeding chapters, we will examine as much as is known about a number of these individuals. Some factors to watch are child abuse, sexual deviance, lack of identity and feelings of alienation, opportunity, mobility, drugs, alcohol, and media attention. We then will create a general profile of modern serial murderers. The origins, motivations, and techniques of these individuals comprise the most frightening mystery of our time. Whatever the cause, be it physiological, psychological, or spiritual, the result is a new variety of human predator.

JUAN CORONA: UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

Nineteen seventy-one was a good year for murder. The year-long trial of the Manson family continued in Los Angeles. In March, Lieutenant William Calley was found guilty of the mass murders at My Lai in Vietnam. The Texas Strangler killed his eleventh victim in August and disappeared. The Zodiac Killer took his last victim in San Francisco and also disappeared. But the biggest event of that year was the arrest and indictment of a Mexican immigrant in Yuba City, California.

The questions inherent in the matter of Juan Corona are engrossing and more than a little frightening. Years after his arrest and conviction for twenty-five murders, the case of Juan Corona remains as baffling as it was then.

Juan Vallejo Corona was born in Autlan, Mexico, in 1934. One of ten children, his mother affectionately called him Juanita, little Juan. Autlan, situated 120 miles south of Guadalajara, is a small town whose only industry was a sugar mill. Poverty in Mexico in the 1930s was even more dramatic than it is today. Rearing a family of ten on the meager income made from picking crops or working at the mill proved extremely difficult. The despair, malnutrition, and hopelessness of abject poverty were simply facts of life. Like so many Hispanics before and since, Juan Corona at an early age began looking north to the United States.

In 1950, Juan followed his older brothers, Natividad and Felix, across the border as an illegal alien. He was sixteen and spoke virtually no English. He found himself in America doing exactly what he would have done in Autlan—picking crops. His only saleable attributes were a strong back and a willingness to work.

By 1952 at age eighteen, he obtained a better job driving a truck for one of the construction companies building Folsom Dam. Life had begun to look up for young Juan.

Corona, now reaching maturity, was a stocky, muscular, young man with flashing dark eyes and a ready smile. The long hours driving the gravel truck did not stop him from enjoying life in his new land. Weekends and evenings were spent socializing and dancing. Five feet eleven inches and 185 pounds, Juan was a talented dancer and attractive to women. Despite the temptations and attractions of the new land, Juan remained loyal to his family. He sent part of his paycheck home every week and usually made the two-thousand-mile roundtrip journey to Autlan for the holidays.

In January of 1953, Corona met and fell in love with a girl from Sacramento. Also Hispanic, her family had been in the United States for many years, and she had been educated in the Sacramento school system. Their attraction for each other quickly led them into difficulty. Like teenagers before and since, they stayed out late and sneaked around to see each other. Under pressure from her family, they were told to marry. Driving to Reno, they wed in the early spring of 1953.

His new bride did not want to leave her family and live at the Folsom construction site. Juan gave up his gravel truck job, and they moved to Sacramento. She found a job as an office worker and he as a common laborer. Within weeks it was obvious that, love match or not, the marriage was doomed. Urged by her family and Juan’s brother, Natividad, the couple went to a priest, and the marriage was annulled.

Leaving Sacramento, Juan again found himself working in the fields. He found better employment working in a gypsum plant in the winter. Living with his brother, Nat, near Yuba City, Juan scraped and saved every penny for the day when he could head his own company. During that period, his older brother also taught Juan the contract labor business.

Contract labor, or casual labor as it is sometimes called, is a tradition in the farm industry. Because of the vast size of many California produce farms and the need for intermittent labor-intensive work, this practice is common. At certain times of the year, labor contractors, who are state licensed middlemen, provide large numbers of seasonal workers. These are usually unskilled workers obtained by recruiting in skid row areas. Working from dawn to dark for several weeks, they are then idle until the next seasonal demand. The labor contractor makes his income by charging a fee to the farm owner, then paying the laborers the absolute minimum and pocketing the difference.

Two days before Christmas 1955, as the brothers prepared for their annual journey to Autlan, one of the worst rainstorms in California history broke a levee in the Yuba City/Marysville area. The region was flooded, and reports of drowned bodies were common. By mid-January, the area remained largely under water, but those who had been evacuated began to return.

On 11 January 1956, Natividad petitioned the court for an involuntary civil commitment against Juan. He said that Juan, who had a lifelong fear of water, thought that the people he was seeing on the streets of Yuba City were dead and that a calamity of biblical proportions had taken place. It was later established that forty people had, indeed, drowned. Nat said Juan had gone mad and was spending all his time praying and reading the Bible.

At Nat’s urging, Juan saw two doctors who indicated that they thought he was schizophrenic. Those physicians were not psychiatrists, but the mental health law at the time allowed them to certify him as incompetent. Juan was transported in handcuffs to the DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn, California. The decision was made to deal with his alleged malady using ECT, electro-convulsive therapy, commonly known as shock treatment.

The incident was typical of the primitive level of mental health treatment in America during the mid-1950s. A man with a limited command of the English language was alleged to be mentally ill, certified as ill by individuals with no competence in the field, transported in handcuffs by armed guards to a secure hospital facility, diagnosed as schizophrenic and combative, and given ECT—all within a period of one week.

During the next several weeks, Corona was subjected to a cycle of twenty-two shock treatments. That technological approach was much in vogue in the United States in the 1950s. Little-known side effects like memory loss and muscle spasms later brought ECT into disfavor with the psychiatric profession. Today, it is used very rarely and then only with individuals who are suffering from the most acute forms of psychosis and/or depression.

Juan was released from Auburn on 18 April 1956. He was freed with the understanding that he would return to Mexico and reside there with one of his brothers. Juan would later say he knew he had been ill but could remember nothing of the events leading up to and including his hospitalization.

Within months, Juan returned to the United States, that time with a valid resident alien work permit. Returning to Yuba City, Juan again moved in with Nat. Apparently, the hospital incident did not cause any ill will between the brothers.

Juan, now twenty-two years old, had changed dramatically. He no longer drank and was interested only in business. When he went to bars at all, he drank coffee. His quiet, courtly demeanor generated many acquaintances but no close friends. Back working in the fields again, he filled his idle hours with odd jobs around the community.

The next three years were largely uneventful. Juan and Nat lived together in the